Director: Robert Anderson
Writers: Dave Dixon from a story by Robert Anderson and Terry Anderson
From: Cult Cinema
A girl has an affair with her teacher leading to a pregnancy scare. While waiting for test results, she and her friend go hitchhiking to Big Sur.
Mindy is heading to the dance with her boyfriend Bill. It’s the night before her 18th birthday and he makes a joke about hooking up “after midnight when you’re no longer legally jailbait.”
Yeah. Bare with me folks, this’ll take a minute. The movie thinks pedophilia is cute. I could say at this point that the joke doesn’t make sense since Bill’s not 18, but, you know what, that doesn’t matter.
They go to the dance where Mindy throws a tantrum over the band having already started and her being denied her big entrance, whatever that would be. Their teacher, Mr. Thompson, is working as a chaperone and taking pictures for the yearbook. Mindy gets mad that he takes what she thinks is an unflattering picture and Mr. Thompson’s wife complains about the music and him hanging out at the dance.
Get it? The movie is setting it up to be okay for him to have sex with a student because his wife has noticed him creeping on students and trying to have an affair.
Anyway, I don’t need to go through the whole plot because there isn’t one. Mindy goes to teachers’ house the next day, “seduces” him, and ends up screwing him in a shack somewhere. Time passes, she keeps hooking up with teacher, and then worries that she’s pregnant. Thompson sends her to a doctor he knows for a pregnancy test and she’s picked up by her friend Sandy. Since it’ll take two days to get the results Mindy and Sandy, through a series of events, end up taking Bill’s car, ditching it on the side of the road, and go hitchhiking to Big Sur.
They’re picked up by a motorcycle gang that tries to rape Sandy. Mindy manages to escape and yells, “Run!” which is apparently all it takes to free Sandy from the situation. They spend the night in an abandoned hayloft where Sandy tells Mindy that she swallowed one of the pills the bikers gave her and doesn’t feel well.
The next morning, Mindy and Sandy steal a motorcycle the gang left behind to continue their trip to Big Sur. Sandy doesn’t want to go, but Mindy forces her. Cause, really, it’s not like Sandy’s been through anything. After an interminable series of adventures that come to nothing, they end up in Big Sur where they’re arrested for being near a bunch of hippies wanted by the cops for peddling dope.
Meanwhile, Bill, Thompson, and Sandy’s boyfriend have been driving to Big Sur to find the girls. They end up at the police station just before the bust happens and see the girls get brought in. Cut to graduation. We see Mindy walk, Thompson and his wife having made amends, and a headline in the paper saying Mindy and Sandy beat the rap. At the dance that night, Bill tells Mindy that he’s been accepted to MIT and will be leaving for prep school on Monday, meaning they’ve now basically broken up. Mindy goes over to talk to Mr. Thompson and his wife who introduce her to the new teacher. Mindy starts dancing with him and the rest of the movie is just still frames of her and the teacher, implying she’s going to hook up with him too. THE END.
I hated this movie. I really, really hated this movie. The characters are completely unlikeable and there are no stakes for anything so nothing matters. The movie is never moving toward something. Even the pregnancy scare doesn’t happen until 42 minutes into this 100-minute movie. The only moment of consequence is the biker gang sequence, and that’s basically Mindy watching her best friend almost get raped. That event, though, doesn’t stop her from continuing on her trip so it doesn’t actually have any consequences. In fact, after it happens and Sandy says she wants to go home, Mindy threatens to abandon her.
Mindy is a monster.
She’s played as ceaselessly whiny, selfish, and childish, which is the creepiest part. There’s a shot of her talking to Sandy while just wearing a nightie and she’s doing that little kid twisting back and forth while fiddling with the fringes thing. You know, like when a toddler doesn’t want to go to bed. She’s playing an 18-year-old who’s dating a teacher and we’re not supposed to see his hooking up with her as problematic on any level.
No, we’re not. In fact, the movie plays that situation off as though it’s okay. When Thompson finds out Mindy may be pregnant, he tells his wife. He somehow blames her for it, in fact, and she leaves until the end of the movie when they’re all huggy and happy again for some reason.
I basically have to stop writing because I’m just getting mad about this movie. There’s so much more to say, but I don’t want to give this flick any more of my time. My notes include the phrase, “Life is short, but movies like this make it feel very long.” So if you’re a terminal patient, I recommend this movie to you. Otherwise, stay away. It’s not even bad in an entertaining way, just endlessly infuriating.
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